


indemnity clause

by arbitrarily



Category: Miss Sloane (2016)
Genre: F/M, Future Fic, Missing Scene, Post-Canon, Power Play, Workplace Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-25
Updated: 2017-02-25
Packaged: 2018-09-23 14:03:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9660419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: He was right about at least one thing: she really is a piece of work.Elizabeth serves three years of scandal.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Big time spoilers for the end of the movie.

 

 

It was not that kind of leaving. I am not that kind of gone.  
CATHERINE LACEY

 

 

 

 

I.

APRIL

 

 

She finds the office is empty, save for him. 

Elizabeth does not disguise her approach. She watches Schmidt through the glass as he works. His head is bowed, lines creased into his forehead, frowning as he reads. He has not seen her yet. 

Elizabeth knows: she has made their job harder. She’s made his job harder. The _Sentinel_ ’s screed against her hadn’t helped. They were fucked further still by the Senate Ethics Committee breathing down her neck via Schmidt’s. That morning when she had come in, Schmidt had called her into his office before she’d even taken off her coat. And that was when he told her: a hearing date had been set. They were going to try to run her out of town. They were sharpening their pikes against her. They needed her to lawyer up. She spent the day downstairs in Daniel’s office, grilled backwards and forwards about her own vulnerabilities (“None,” she had told him, and she could see the temptation to resign shine bright in his angry eyes) and the Fifth Amendment. 

It’s well after nine now and only Schmidt remains. That’s not a surprise. He is always here when she is. He all but lives in this building. 

She pauses at the open door to his office. She can feel it, humming through her – she’s all but crackling with unspent energy. So she steps through, raps her knuckles on the doorframe before leaning against it. Schmidt doesn’t look up. Maybe he saw her coming after all.

“Anyone ever call you Rudy?” She unknots the overlarge bow at her throat and cracks her neck. She’s restless; that’s what it is. Ten hours in front of a lawyer is enough to leave anyone restless. 

“Not if they ever wished to speak to me again,” he says. He doesn’t look up.

“Noted,” she says. She’s still leaning against the door jamb, her arms crossed over her waist. She slips her foot out of her high heel and flexes it before sliding it back in. Schmidt drops the binder down onto his desk and finally looks up at her. The rest of the office is dark, their privacy complete and claustrophobic. He doesn’t say anything, he just looks at her. Expectant: that's the word for him.

Elizabeth thinks she knows him. After he had approached her that first time, after the job offer, she had looked into him. Rodolfo Schmidt. There wasn’t a lot out there about him, which told her he was either a bit player or more important than she had originally assumed. But there was enough information to form a picture. He grew up in Denmark, his mother Spanish, and he split his later years among London, New York, and Geneva before he moved to D.C. in the mid-90s. He came from old money that had diminished with each successive generation. He hadn’t been particularly smart with that old money: investments in failed start-ups, bankrolling of unsuccessful political campaigns. And then, Peterson Wyatt. A small bit from _The Hill_ revealed – via unsourced gossip – that Schmidt hadn't wanted his name on the door. So he liked the anonymity. His first wife had not felt similarly. Some Belgian ex-pat who had devoted much of her time and even more of her money to issues as varied as ethical salmon farming, global tariffs on imported nuts, and Anna Wintour’s sartorial approval. There was nothing of the divorce online, at least nothing obvious. A cursory Google search revealed an item in _Town and Country_ about her remarriage to one of those morning cable news pundits. Schmidt’s name was a footnote in the article – as in, “The bride was previously married to boutique D.C. lobbyist Rodolfo Schmidt.”

He’s too sharp for a boutique lobbyist. It’s not the first time she’s thought it. He’s like one of those great jungle cats that had the misfortune of wasting a life designed for sharp teeth and the hunt in a nature preserve. That's a compliment. Watching him now, Elizabeth thinks, if anything, he has been her blindspot. She hasn’t looked deeply enough into him. Blind trust isn't something she's ever been able to comprehend. But maybe he isn't hiding anything. Maybe it’s just that she can’t understand him. There’s a genuine kindness to him, an honest frustration she inspires in him. Elizabeth doesn’t know what to do with that. 

“Well,” he finally prompts. 

She steps into his office and shuts the door behind her. He’s still looking at her, watchful but not judgmental. Not yet. “Well,” she repeats. “On the advice of counsel I respectfully decline to answer your question based on my rights under the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution.” Schmidt remains steadfastly unamused. “Your legal eagle taught me that little constitutional trick. Only took the better part of,” she glances down at her watch (diamond-flecked Cartier, a gift to herself three years ago), “ten hours.” He arches an eyebrow, but he still doesn’t say anything. He’s taken his jacket off since she saw him last. His shirt sleeves are rolled up to his elbows, his collar unbuttoned. He’s taken his tie off, too. He looks as exhausted as she refuses to ever let herself feel. 

“What are you still doing here?” she asks him. She circles around to his side of the desk, stands opposite from him, against the glass wall.

He turns in his chair to face her and a further unamused huff of laughter escapes him. “You might be off the campaign, but we still have our harpoons poised for Heaton-Harris.”

“Our great white.”

“Our, huh.” He leans back in his cheap office chair. It creaks under his weight. They’re nothing like the leather ergonomic monstrosities over at Cole, Kravitz and Waterman. It’s the one, and the only, thing Elizabeth can say she misses there. 

Schmidt’s still watching her. He does that a lot. He watches her; he doesn’t miss much. Maybe that’s why she had thought he was a journalist when she first met him – he’s observant. He’s background. He tells the story that she creates. 

She lets her own gaze settle over him. There’s a not-unappealing leanness to him. A face that could easily lapse into cruelty if he let it. She blinks away whatever it was she on the precipice of thinking. She has to believe that she has everything under control. She has to believe that, even if she can feel it: she is starting to spin out. 

“Was I worth the cost?” she asks him. A mean grin cuts her face in half as she steps closer to him. He does not return it.  She wonders if he’s ever experienced the satisfaction of taking another person apart. She always imagined it as the same as field dressing any other big game. Imagines that, maybe, he is teaching himself right now. 

Schmidt sighs. He runs a hand over his head and pauses to rub at the base of his skull. “I feel like we let the fox right into the henhouse.”

“Folksy metaphors don’t suit you,” she says, disregarding what he’s said. They are still watching each other carefully. They are assessing one another, she thinks, like any other negotiation. Like any other thin line she has ever walked. 

She wants to know how close she is to the edge. How long she’s been there. She feels it, every now and again, with increasingly alarming regularity, stirrings of what can only be called panic. She’s losing her grasp. She thinks she might already be over the edge and the only way forward is straight down. 

“We’re not going to win, Liz,” he says. He wears defeat like a threadbare, outgrown suit. She raises her chin.

He told her once she was free to set herself on fire. She thinks she has already lit the match. She thinks she wants him to feel the heat from the licking flames. 

“No. We will,” she says. Elizabeth drops down to her knees.

 

 

 

Elizabeth: on her knees, behind his desk. Between his legs, already spread. Men are that easy. That reliable. She looks up at him and she bites her bottom lip.

“What,” Schmidt starts. He raises his hands like he might touch her, grab her. He does neither, and this, she thinks, is his problem. He doesn’t complete the question. Instead, he watches her, narrow-eyed and distrusting. She thinks there’s more to him than she ever gave him credit. She thinks he wants to see how this plays out. 

“Elizabeth,” he says, all the same. “You’re upset.” She admires the constraint in his voice. She’d like to hear what that sounds like when it comes undone. When he feels as out of control as she does.

Elizabeth laughs, humorless and sharp. “I’m not upset. I’m on my knees.” She settles both her hands on his knees. She’s always liked how men are put together, a certain out-sized functionality to them. Nothing hidden to their strength the way it is with women. Elizabeth drags her hands up his thighs. She can feel the muscles clench under her as he holds himself in check. Her eyes drift down to the hurried rise and fall of his chest under his wrinkled oxford. She’s barely even touched him. 

It’s that easy: she guides her hand over the cartoonish obscenity of his cock, hardening – interested and more decisive than he is. She offers the firm press of her hand that she knows is more tease than relief. She knows everything. This is another thing he has accused her of. There are worse crimes. 

She leans forward, one hand splayed along his inner thigh, the other brushing along his covered cock. She hears him mutter, “Fuck,” when she gets her mouth on him through his trousers. He sounds near apologetic; she doesn’t think it is aimed at her. 

Elizabeth mouths at the curve of him, already half-hard, through his trousers, her lipstick barely smudging. The wool is heavy and wet under her tongue, but then, so is he. She hears him speak again – the clenched jaw audible, the barely coiled restraint, it’s that easy: he truly is the lonely divorcee remarried to his work, that hard-up for a halfway decent fuck – “I thought you said the office was under surveillance.”

She glances up at him through her hair. She impatiently tucks it behind her ear. This is his second attempt at dissuading her, even less convincing than his first. She doesn’t think there will be a third. “That’s illegal. You know that.”

Schmidt’s face goes that much darker. She catches how his grip tightens on the arms of his chair. How his eyes can’t stoop darting down to her mouth. He looks like he wants to kill her or fuck her or a combination of the two that makes something inside of her clench and want. 

“You lied to me?” He doesn’t say _again_. He doesn’t need to.

Elizabeth dips her head. She traces along his cock with a dark red painted fingernail. She pauses at the zip and then applies that much more pressure. He has the dignity not to squirm. “Misdirection.”

“What the fuck is wrong with you,” but it’s not a question and he’s not doing anything to push her off of him. She undoes his belt.

 

 

 

He’s as easy and as eager as she thought he’d be. Reluctance gives way to pliable to this: his head dropped back, white-knuckled fists, needful and as hungry as her own mouth. 

She tastes him before she swallows him. He’s hot and heavy in her mouth, already making her jaw ache, and his groan sounds sacrificial. This is what she wanted. It’s been so long since there was any chase related to a fuck, and god, she’s missed it. She had grown used to the paid product. You paid a man to fuck you, and that was what he did. No element of surprise to it, not really. He went down on you. He fucked you. He made you come at least twice or both of you knew he wasn’t worth his asking price.

Schmidt’s hand catches in her hair and he fucks too hard into her mouth, hard enough to make her choke, make her eyes water, unapologetic when he pulls at her hair and does it again. She presses her thighs together, knows that overpriced scrap of La Perla black lace is soaked and ruined. 

This is what she had wanted: the hunt, the chase, the capture. To control. To win. And he knows it, she can tell – the strangled way his moans catch in his throat, how he has yet to say her name again. He knows she won. He must have learned at least that much from her by now. Everything is a game. Everything is a competition. it is always zero sum: there is a winner and there is a loser. And if losing is her mouth wrapped around your cock swallowing you down, there are worse ways to concede defeat. She’s sure of that. 

She thinks about it, sometimes. She hasn’t forgotten the way he spoke to her the night she outed Esme. Sometimes she thinks about that more than she actually thinks about what she did to Esme. That misdirected sense of disappointment she had felt when she finally left the office – unsure who she was disappointed in more, him or her, and which one would make it worse. He had told her he wasn’t her opponent. She had wanted to tell him, that’s all she’s ever known. Adversaries or pawns. There’s no such thing as an ally, not in this town and not in this business. It’s not about giving, this is not about giving, she thinks, but about proving a point. She can’t remember what the point is – _winning_ , that’s always the point – and maybe forgetting is just another part of losing control. She lets him fill her mouth, she lets him fuck her mouth, she has not lost control, she has not lost control, she has not lost anything, she has everything in hand, in mouth, he’s under her control, he –

His cock hits the back or her throat and she swallows, his hips lifting, back arching, as he comes. 

Her lipstick is smeared on both her mouth and his cock. She thinks that’s the sort of thing men fantasize about late at night in their offices when it comes to her. Elizabeth Sloane, on her knees. Schmidt doesn’t know how lucky he has it. She wipes at her wet mouth with the back of her hand; she can still taste him.

Or maybe he does. She had expected shame if she had expected anything from him. What she finds instead is that he is looking at her wrong, like she is equal parts mirage and disgrace, with a touch of something she doesn’t want to call tenderness but she doesn’t have another word for it. Like he knows something about her he’s not supposed to know. Like he thinks that means he knows how to fix her. 

“Come here,” he says, both too quiet and overloud in the empty office.

Elizabeth rises on unsteady legs, shaken by how much she wants. She had not anticipated that – her own labored breathing, the knock-kneed walk to him. The obedience when he commands her to come. It’s such a simple impulse, one that blots out everything else. She wants – that doesn’t mean she needs.

His hand is hot on her thigh. He pushes her skirt up, slowly, impossibly slow, and she can feel her impatience flare. She grabs him by the wrist and then, yes, his hand is there, covering her. She stands over him, her fingers digging into his shoulder as she rocks against his palm. 

Maybe that is a lesson here: to prove a point, to gain that point, you have to cede yourself. 

Schmidt mutters something like, “ _Christ_ ,” his thumb rubbing over the soaked lace. He barely has to touch her, he doesn't touch her, her panties only, and it’s enough. She sighs softly when she comes – that gentle kind of orgasm, rolling through her but at a distance, as if promising something more, something better. She thinks that’s all she'll get, that he’ll make her leave, make her take his disappointment in her with her, but then he's pushing her. He has her propped up on the edge of his desk, her skirt wrinkled and bunched over her hips. He has his mouth on her, first over the lace and then shoved aside, thumbing her open to his mouth, and that’s good, that’s better. A sharp immediacy to it that has her clutching at the edge of the desk. That same demanding mouth she has challenged at every turn now between her legs, pushing against her still, but better. Licking her open. So much better. 

Her fingers trace down to his jaw, along his mouth, and then he’s sucking on her fingers, threatening to bite, his own fingers pushing deep inside her. Men like him aren’t supposed to fuck this well. She’s noisy. She knocks something over on his desk. She’s losing control, and then, it’s gone. She doesn’t bother trying to stay quiet.

He kisses her after, and for a single beat, she allows it. She kisses him back. She can taste herself, wonders if he can taste himself in her mouth, she gasps into the heat of his, and then, it’s gone. The whole thing strikes her as obscene; she’s over the edge. She’s won, but she’s lost.

The long con is already in place, known only to her. The only seat she has ever known at the table is as the dealer, whether anyone else is willing to recognize her as such. She has never considered the consequences beyond the immediate future actions that might occur, not really. Future events that will not reach her. But she’s staring down the barrel of something horribly real now, and still. She hasn’t blinked. She is still in control. She has to be. She pulls back from him. Schmidt’s face is flushed and she wonders what would happen if she let him hold her down for just a little bit longer. She pushes him away.

After – after that night, after the hearings, the trial – the unconfirmed rumors about them are added to the shitstorm that surrounds her. She fucked male escorts. She fucked her boss. She fucked anyone who might give her what she wanted, literal or figurative.

Ask Esme: she’d tell you. It’s true. There’s no one Elizabeth Sloane wouldn’t fuck to get what she had decided was hers.

 

 

 

 

 

II.

NOVEMBER,  _ONE YEAR LATER_

 

 

They release her early. 

Elizabeth had enough internet access on the inside to know what she had become on the outside. The photos of her being escorted into the back of a black sedan, FBI jackets on every man surrounding her. The mugshot with the painted red mouth and ungiving eyes. The grainy cellphone photo someone sold from the inside of her, dressed in uniform inmate khaki, her hair dull, pulled back loosely from her bare face. That had been at the beginning of her sentence, when she was considered something untested by the others. Before she had learned the rules in there. There are rules everywhere. Learning how to bend them to suit your favor was the key. 

She had known, even then: the hearing, the stunned look on every face that had ever known her, the handcuffs, the black sedan and the FBI jackets, the mug shot – it’d take more than the state to rehabilitate her. What was inside her wasn’t broken; it was American. How fucking patriotic.

She found that prison was a manageable microcosm of D.C. – it was still all about winning. Still about commanding a lead over everybody else. She has paid her debt to society, but she can’t help but feel there’s something owed to her in return. Take the girl out of the Beltway, can’t take the Beltway out of the girl. Or the aphorisms, apparently. She has paid the ultimate price but that doesn’t make her a different person.

So she has changed but she hasn’t changed.

She had held law clinics for the girls on the inside despite the fact she never took the bar and had never even sat inside a law school classroom. She only had outdated books in the library to go off of, but she managed to convince the warden of the necessity of a LexisNexis account for the girls. And then, somehow, out of the minuscule budget, it had been bequeathed to them. She learned later where it came from. The money, the LexisNexis account, the new gently-used computers. Peterson Wyatt had taken on prison reform in addition to gun control. How timely. Two martyrs, one firm, she had said to Daniel during one of his visits she actually took. That was when he told her Esme no longer worked for them. 

She had ignored everyone but Daniel in prison. Everyone but Daniel, and Esme. Esme never came to visit her, and she felt she was probably owed that, too. But she wrote to her. Handwritten letters that never spelled out an apology and never told of a life lived in prison, but rather sketched out any and all of her less reprehensible maneuvers she had executed in a previous lifetime to achieve a win. She had sent Esme her playbook, a watered-down and neutered version of it, but a playbook all the same. Esme never wrote back; she hadn’t expected her to. 

Schmidt came, more often in the early days, less towards the end of her abridged sentence. She never saw him. She never took his calls. She told Daniel once and only once, no names used, after Daniel had said to her _he comes to visit too, you know_ : “Tell him he’s smarter than this. Take a hint. Protect the ego. I have nothing to say to him.”

“He worries,” Daniel started and then he stopped. “He cares. You know he cares.”

“Tell him to choose a more deserving target.” And that was the last they spoke of it. But she still kept up with their efforts, the successes and the losses of the Brady Campaign, via the prison computer and the shaky internet bought with money she had most likely once worked to secure. She saw Esme on the TV sometimes. 

Daniel petitioned for her early release. She served a little over a year.

 

 

 

He finds her at the hotel. 

After her release she moved back into a hotel. She couldn’t afford a suite at the Watergate, so she found herself at the Crystal City Marriott, the Metro running right underneath the hotel. Her parole officer hadn’t liked it, but she still carried some cache or at the least that silver debater’s tongue, because she convinced him to okay it. She told him it was temporary. He believed her. She didn’t believe herself. She didn’t look at any apartments and her idea of a job search was to see who of her old contacts was still willing to speak to her. Surprisingly, a great many of them were. In her absence, she had become both the Joan of Arc and the Benedict Arnold of the lobbying industry, dependent on who you asked.

She had met him outside that fundraiser – and just like he had found her there, he finds her at the Marriott. Her face is mostly plain, her warpaint unapplied. She’s scheduled at the salon for the next day. Cut, dye, waxing, mani, pedi. She’d book a massage but they’ve never done anything for her anyway. Schmidt looks the same as when she left him. A little colder, maybe, but then she might have remembered him wrong.

She finds Schmidt in the lobby of her hotel the second evening she’s been living there. He looks out of place amongst the tourists and their Declaration of Independence t-shirts and tour bus lanyards. He looks expensive, that’s what she thinks. That was an error on her part, she realizes now, to have assumed any man who could afford the cut of a suit like his could have been a journalist. She should have smelled the money and the idealism on him the moment she met him. That was her weakness. She’s still not sure if he recognized it in her.

The last time Elizabeth had spoken to him had been during the sentencing phase of her trial. Schmidt had sighed and he had asked her, not for the first time, “What the fuck did you do.”

She was out on bail for the trial. They were at a Starbucks or an an Au Bon Pain or whatever it was, close to the courthouse. She had a coffee; he was empty-handed.

“I gave you a win,” she had said. His head had snapped up sharply to look at her. There wasn’t any victory there. He shook his head. 

“Liz, what’d you do,” and it wasn’t a question. It was something else, a white flag, maybe, so she cleared her throat and she sat up that much straighter. She ran the pad of her thumb along the line of her bottom lip and it came away smudged in red. 

“You should go,” she told him. “There’s nothing left for you to do here.”

“There never was,” he said, and then he left.

Schmidt stands when he spots her approaching. Folds the _Wall Street Journal_ neatly and places it down next to a stack of brochures for duck boat tours and Segway tours, an empty Starbucks cup.

“I don’t supposed you’re here to offer me another job.”

“History rarely repeats so neatly. Besides, I’m still reeling from the last time I hired you.”

“Shame. I’m homeless and unemployed. I thought you do-gooders were all for helping out my unfortunate lot.”

His mouth quirks up to the side. “Of the many things Elizabeth Sloane has been, I sincerely doubt unfortunate ranks among them.”

“What are you doing here?” she asks then, her voice quieter, her own fake smile sluicing off.

“You refused to meet me. Every single time. It’s a long enough drive out to Anderson.”

“I never asked you to come.”

“I should blame you – I started financing a podcast. “For Which It Stands.” I’m still not sold on the title.” He pauses, rubs at the back of his neck; Elizabeth does not move or give an inch. “I listened to a lot of podcasts on that drive. I liked that one best.”

She offers a small grin. She crosses her arms over her chest. “What do you know. From Cell Block C, I used to listen to that one. Once I earned privileges, that is. A small suggestion I might make: tell that one boy to quit drilling down into the weeds of constitutional law. No one’s listening to hear that. They want debate. They want fireworks. What they don’t want is a droning law school T.A. not a single student has ever wanted to fuck.”

“God bless America,” he drawls. He sticks his hands in his pockets. “I never pegged you as one to offer free advice.”

“And I never pegged you as one to fail to recognize every exchange in this town is quid pro quo.”

“I owe you something in return now?”

“Or maybe it was me who owed you something.” She makes the mistake of meeting his gaze. She can’t remember if his eyes have always been that alert and present, but she suspects the answer is: probably. A gust of cold November air rushes in from the open door. She doesn’t want to be the first one to blink.

“Why wouldn’t you let me see you.” Not a question. He does that a lot: phrases the interrogative as a declarative. It’s a debate tactic, one she never has cared for. 

“It was federal lock-up. No conjugal visits,” she says, finally letting that nasty familiar tone cut into her voice. It’s a relief. “What would have been the point.” Maybe she does like that tactic after all; it feels good and cruel to her. 

Schmidt’s face is unreadable until not-quite a grin lifts his mouth. Maybe there’s a bit of cruelty to him, too. Maybe she managed to teach him at least that much: a fight requires claws. It demands a hungry, rabid mouth with which you devour. 

“Daniel told me you were doing well.” She wasn’t expecting that. She doesn’t know why he says it. It’s like he wants her to know he was invested enough to keep tabs on her. That should be clear enough by his presence in her lobby.

“That fucking narc,” she says, but not unkindly. 

“I paid his salary. It’s the least he could do.”

Silence threatens between them again, that heaviness she had felt before only growing in weight. He shouldn’t be here. He’s supposed to be here. 

“Look,” he says, and she remembers that tone well. “I have my car. You wanna get out of here, get a bite to eat?” She doesn’t say anything. “Don’t make me say I’ll settle for a Jamba Juice or whatever you’ve got in your hotel food court.”

“It’s the Metro’s food court, or it’s neither, and it’s just here, feeding the masses.”

“That’s really not my point.”

“No. No, thank you,” she says. His eyes narrow, quick, perhaps offended, but unsurprised. And then she says, “I have a minibar in my room though. If you’re interested.”

 

 

 

They ride the elevator in silence up to her room.

They keycard beeps in the door when she swipes it, Schmidt shuts it behind him as they enter. Evening is falling fast, the room darkened. She had left the desk lamp on; it serves as their only source of light.

They go no further than the small entryway to her room. Despite the cramped space, Schmidt keeps his distance. He smells the same – the same cologne, the same soap. She used what the hotel gave her. “This isn’t why I came here,” he tells her. His voice is both tight and quiet. Elizabeth slouches back against the wall. Her leg knocks into his. Elizabeth is always looking for the exploitable, useful angle with anything. She doesn’t want to do that with him; she fears what it will expose of her.

“What other reason is there to come see me?” She says it flat, reflective as glass. The light from the desk barely reaches them, but she can read the frown that creases his face. 

“Elizabeth.” She doesn’t like how he says her name. She never has. He says it like it’s too much to fit in one man’s mouth. His mouth.

The tension from earlier is sharper here, charged, now that they are alone. They, too, are changed but the same. 

She steps forward then. Too close to him. She catches that small hitch of breath from him. “Don’t pretend you’re disappointed,” she says, mean and accusatory. He looks down at her. From this angle, he’s all unforgiving harsh lines, a tight mouth, the bob of his throat when he swallows.

She almost misses it, that quicksilver moment when he turns from known to something more dangerous. What she had always wanted from him and he never took the bait. Until now.

He crowds her back against the wall next to the door.

Schmidt barely leans into her yet she finds herself arching into him, the buckle of his belt digging in uncomfortably above her hip before he pulls his own hips back from her. “I crack your chest open, I don’t think I find anything in there,” he says. No, he snarls – animal, hot-blooded and new to her.

Elizabeth never untaught herself the lesson that kindness does not fit a man in power. Maybe that’s why she’s always underestimated him: she detected humanity and called it a weakness.

“You wanna find out?” 

She takes his hand and she places it in the center of her chest. Her heart rate has started to kick up and he leaves his hand there before he drags his hand to her breast. She didn’t realize she was holding her breath, but she releases it now. He exhales then too, breath escaping through bared teeth, as he squeezes her more firmly, pushes his body against her, her body against the wall, and for the first time Elizabeth lets herself relish the feel of being caught. 

He slides his hand down her pants, determination writ across his face. Her shoulder blades knock back against the wall. He knows better than to kiss her so he doesn’t. He’s watching her face instead of her body.

Her pants drop down around her ankles and she kicks her heels off. Her panties are stretched around his hand, biting into her hips, until she finally pushes them down too, his hand steadying and wide on her thigh as she stumbles out of them. His fingers inside her are rough, and she stands on tiptoe, wants to crawl up the wall, as her body curls around his hand and into him. He’s deliberate with her – the fingers twisting and pushing deeper into her, forcing out a reaction earned by him, the bruising grip of his free hand on her hip – as if he wants her to feel each touch of his hand on her body as a blow to leave a mark. As something permanent she will carry with her. It’s not violence and it’s not romance but it is, she thinks, what she has earned. Deserves. A punishment, then.

If he wants to see this as charity, then go ahead – she wants to come. She had thought about this, sometimes, when she’d silently touch herself at night on the inside. She called it a weakness, but she’d come anyway.

She pushes his coat off his shoulders, and he lets her. She’s impatient even in the brief pause when he stops touching her. He’s got her pinioned to the wall. He tells her to take her shirt off, and she does, now naked against him. She tries to get his shirt unbuttoned, she gets her hands on his throat, the bared dip between his collarbones, a terrible desperation that leaves her hands shaking. She will not name that feeling. Schmidt grinds his hips against her, groaning low, his entire body covering hers, and she can hear how wet she is around his fingers. It’s when he bends his head and bites at her neck that she finally comes.

 

 

 

She watches him from the bed as he undresses.

Schmidt’s a fucking Boy Scout with the condom, breathing hard already as he slides it on. He manhandles her onto her knees and Elizabeth’s not sure what she expected from him but it wasn’t this, and she’s that much wetter for it. She thinks she says his name as he spreads her for him, her head dropped forward. Her fingers curl into the sheets. There’s nothing to be lost here, she tells herself, because she has already lost it all.

He fucks her from behind. She comes twice like that. Her arms give out under her weight the first time, and he fucks her through it, makes her take it. Makes her whine and twitch and stumble up to the line of begging. The second time, he has grabbed her by the hair, hauled her back and her knees keep slipping against the rumpled sheets. It’s like this – the arch of her neck, the bend of her spine, her body pressed back against his, that perfect angle inside of her – that he rips his name from her again. 

She’s panting, her mind mercifully blank, when Schmidt rolls her over. He slips out of her, slips the condom off and it takes only a couple pumps of his wrist before his gasp bleeds into a bit-off groan and his come hits her skin. He collapses beside her, their legs still tangled together, and she doesn’t move. She listens to his breath even out, feels his come dry on her skin. 

She rolls then and unexpected, perhaps even to herself, she leans over and bites at the skin over his ribs. She feels more than hears Schmidt’s surprised grunt. Elizabeth drags herself up his body, and she is tentative as she kisses him. Her mouth barely brushes against his, her tongue traces the seam of his parted mouth, before she sucks his bottom lip into her mouth. Both of them have their eyes open. Good, she thinks. He’s learned to be predator rather than prey. She kisses him then, full and breathless, and he kisses her. His hand covers her throat before it catches in her hair, cradling her skull as he presses her down into the bed. 

She should have know, that hawkish watchful face of his betrayed his bleeding heart: he kisses like he wants to eat her alive.

 

 

 

“I’ve never had a woman call me by my last name in bed before.”

“What’s the verdict?”

Schmidt doesn’t answer her directly. He shakes his head as if shaking her off. “I’m more curious,” he says, too conversational, his fingers moving quickly and efficiently as he buttons his shirt, “as to what I’ve learned it finally takes to shut you up.”

Elizabeth’s smirk twists. “You should be careful. I’m an ex-con. We don’t take kindly to threats.”

“You’ve never taken kindly to much of anything at all.”

“He says to the woman who just took his dick inside her.”

“I think we both know that had nothing to do with kindness.”

She silently watches him finish dressing. She’s still naked in the bed. She leans back, lets him look at the pale lines of her. She left the blinds parted, but the city isn’t visible from her window. Nothing out there but dark.

“So you got a job for me, or what?” she asks the dark window, turning back to him only when he does not reply. He’s standing very still and watching her very closely. 

“You haven’t changed a bit, have you.”

“You don’t want me changed. If you did, you wouldn’t have kept my protege on payroll.”

“Your protege,” he repeats. “We had to deprogram Jane like she was an escaped member of a death cult.” She rolls her eyes at his pointed look.

She flops back against the rumpled pillows and stares up at the ceiling. “You want my resume? My special skills include surveillance tradecraft, self-immolation, and sucking cock – all three of which you could attest to firsthand.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“What? You thought I learned humility and that left me toothless?”

“I never know what to think when it comes to you.”

“But you do think of me.”

“Don’t do that.”

She can’t see him from where she’s laid back against the pillows. It’s probably better that way. 

“Prison reform,” she calls out to him. She props herself up on her elbows. “You got your ace in the hole right here.”

“That’s what this was about?” There’s that dangerous look to him again. The tightened jaw, the dark eyes that burn a little too bright. So he has learned: to think like her. To look three steps ahead.

“It can be about two things.”

“Two things.”

“Prison reform,” she says again.

“And?”

She stares at him and says nothing. He stares back. Then, he throws a business card down on the ugly desk in the corner of the room. He picks up the Marriott pen off the desk and scribbles something on the back of the card. “Call me tomorrow when you’ve got some clothes on. And, Jesus Christ. If you’re gonna live out of a hotel room? Pick a better one than this.”

Elizabeth waits until she hears the door close and then she draws herself up out of bed. She picks up the card.  RODOLFO SCHMIDT, CEO . Written in his overlarge handwriting on the back of the card is his cell, and below that a dollar amount. _Still $0_ , the card reads. 

Standing there, naked and alone in her hotel room, she knows. She’s never going to call him. Not because of the money. But because, she knows, history should not repeat itself.

 

 

 

 

 

III.

JANUARY,  _ONE YEAR LATER_

 

 

Esme is speaking at the podium. 

It’s a fundraiser, midterm elections that fall. Trying to raise funds against the NRA is a David and Goliath level struggle, but Elizabeth didn’t come for that. She came to network.

She had been untouchable when she had first returned. Her career had been essentially dead in the water, but if any city loves a good Lazarus act, it’s this one. Now she works freelance, a consultant, speaking engagements on the side paid for by people who think she still has something worth saying.

So Elizabeth made a name for herself, even as persona non grata.

She doesn’t speak to Esme. They met up once. A couple months after her release, Elizabeth had convinced Esme to meet her for a drink. “You pick the place,” she had told Esme, and she had: a popular happy hour locale too loud and too crowded, too young, for them to achieve any kind of notice. To have any sort of real conversation. 

“I don’t want to know you. I don’t want to be you. And to know you? Requires me to have to be like you. And that’s too much to ask.” That was the last thing Esme had said to her. She left then, her glass of red wine untouched on the table that had been between them, and Elizabeth reached for it. Beneath a thin layer of hurt, Elizabeth thinks she had felt proud.

Now, she listens to Esme’s speech. She’s gotten rather good; she wonders if the rumors of a future House run are true. Jane had been the one to tell her that particular bit of gossip. 

She meets Jane, sometimes. They meet for lunch at the trendy spots around the city Jane picks. Jane likes to be seen and she likes it even more when she is seen with Elizabeth. That’s fine. Jane fills Elizabeth in on the internal struggles at Peterson Wyatt and they eat expensive salads and drink one cocktail each and Elizabeth always pays and Jane always says, “This was nice.” Nice. The operative word for a great deal of her life now. Bland, above the law and above reproach. She is a cautionary tale. She bought an apartment in Chinatown. There’s a doorman and a restaurant next door and she can almost pretend it’s the same thing as a hotel. “D.C.’s own Eloise finally checked out, or so I heard.” A gossip columnist said that to her at a party for the release of Helen Thomas’s posthumous book of recently found notebooks. Elizabeth attended book releases now. She networked. Yves Saint Laurent quit making her favorite shade of red and she had to find a new lipstick. She replaced it with Dior. It’s nice. Sometimes she goes home with men she meets in bars. She's reformed now: she doesn't have escorts, she has one-night stands. If she pays for anything it’s the drinks they share before they fuck and it’s the disappointment she returns with to her own empty apartment. Even the best fuck out of them left her wanting more. It was, she supposes, nice. 

Nice, but not enough. 

Elizabeth finishes the one glass of wine she allowed herself. Riesling, too sweet. From across the room, she spies him. Schmidt. She raises her empty glass in his direction. He does not return the gesture so she smiles at him. She knows of it, the quiet sort of infamy he earned for himself. Like she was a stain, a transferable property. He should thank her for that: with notoriety comes respect, especially in this business. 

They haven’t spoken since she watched him leave her hotel room in Crystal City. 

She finds him again, later, outside. The night air bites and it’s begun to snow, heavy wet flakes that stick to her hair and her coat. Schmidt is waiting on the curb for the valet, the traffic of Dupont Circle stalled at a standstill.

“You thought you’d leave without saying hi to me first?” she calls to him.

He turns around, the lift of his eyebrows telling her that he had expected this. 

“I’d heard you were making the rounds. Didn’t know if I’d see you tonight.”

“Does that make me your Loch Ness monster?” Too cute, and cute has never fit her well. The expression on his face says as much.

“Monstrous enough,” he says, looking back out onto the street. He’s more guarded, barbed even, than she remembers him.

“I thought Esme was good in there.”

He turns back to her, his eyes narrowing into slits. “What are you doing?”

Elizabeth holds her arms open. “I’m making conversation, Schmidt. It’s what people do.”

“Why are you making conversation?” She doesn't like the question, doesn’t like the emphasis on the first word _why_ as if asking it like that makes it far too existential. She doesn’t like that she’s noticed he has yet to say her name. 

“Because,” she says, nearly at a loss. “You’re here. I’m here. Why not?”

“Why not,” he repeats, like he doesn’t understand the concept. She charges straight ahead, joining him on the curb.

“I hear Peterson Wyatt’s been doing well for itself.” Schmidt says nothing in reply. She buries her hands in her coat pockets; she forgot her gloves. “Don’t you want to know how I’ve been doing? You’d be amazed at how good the money is on the lecture circuit.”

“They let you teach,” he says, each word ground out, gravel thick.

“Those who can’t do,” she says and trails off with a smirk. She has his attention now – he’s watching her. _Like old times_ , she refuses to let herself think, but she feels relieved all the same. 

A black car pulls up in front of them. Schmidt takes his keys from the valet. “You coming?” he asks her.

 

 

 

He doesn’t look at her once as he drives.

He lives in a row house out near the Capitol, on Maryland Avenue. An easy walk to the Hart Senate Office Building and the Supreme Court, the Capitol looming alongside them as he drives. Elizabeth arches an eyebrow. She knows what these properties go for. Maybe he got in early. 

The inside of his place is old, cluttered in a mad professor sort of way. His home has the same lived-in feel she remembers at Peterson Wyatt. Her eyes skim over the framed art on the walls, the leather sofa and creased and cracked armchair, none of it particularly fashionable. There’s a a loneliness to the space – to him – she fears might be contagious. She finds his kitchen table is covered in paperwork. Files, drafted bills, used legal pads. Makes her twitch just looking at it. Schmidt follows her eye.

“Organized chaos,” he says, clipped, defensive instead of self-deprecating. 

“No judgment,” she says, as if there is plenty.

She can’t help but contrast it with the emptiness of her own apartment. She had bought all new furniture for it and that’s as far as she went with decorating. There’s a clinical feel to its minimalism – minimalism achieved less by design than accident. The accident was the life she had led. 

Elizabeth wanders over to the wall-to-wall bookshelves. There are the same framed photographs you find in any mildly notable and well-connected D.C. resident: Schmidt with the Clintons at a Christmas party, Schmidt with President Obama on what looks like the ’08 campaign trail, a much-younger Schmidt with a much-younger Ruth Bader Ginsburg. A framed mass-produced photo of Einstein, the one where his tongue is hanging out. A photo of a woman he assumes is a grandmother, back in her sepia-toned younger years. A row of kids photographed in front of a ski chalet; she assumes he’s one of the children, makes her question her assumptions about him, yet again. No real place of honor for any of the photos; they’re just strewn about already crowded bookshelves. He has law volumes – constitutional law, immigration law, criminal law – stacked up in the corner, a lopsided tower of _Foreign Policy_ issues teetering beside it, the top issue proclaiming something about Benghazi, dating itself.

“You want something to drink?” he asks.

“No,” she says, distracted. Her fingers skim the spine of a Roosevelt biography (Teddy, not FD) and the battered copy of _Slaughterhouse-Five_ beside it, no order to his library. 

She glances at him over her shoulder. The tension between them is bowstring tight and she watches him as he tries to step away from it. “I’m going to get a drink,” he says.

Elizabeth follows him. She sidles up to him as he pours a drink from the bar cart (scotch, unsurprising). Her body fits too easy and right against his side, disarmingly so; she fits her hand against him too, flat along the fly of his pants. He stills.

“Christ, you don’t waste any time.”

Her mouth twitches into something close to a smile. Neither of them moves.

“You never called,” he says. His voice is too low, too intimate. She shakes her head, the movement brief.

“I didn’t want to take advantage.” She presses her body closer to his, her hand moving gently against him.

“I don’t believe you.”

“That’s fine.” She has his belt open now. She can feel him hardening, interested, against the side of her hand. He grabs her wrist and stops her. 

“What is this.”

She tips her head to look up at him. “Do you need a diagram? You seemed to understand perfectly well the last time. And the time before that.”

She’s more insistent now, wrapping her hand around him, his own hand still wrapped around her wrist. Schmidt pulls back from her, so she takes his drink. She throws it back in one gasping gulp. It burns going down, but it’s good. It’s something that isn’t him.

She moves to the bar cart. She pours herself another.

“I don’t like being used.”

She laughs in disbelief, all but slams the glass down. “I wanna fuck you, and you complain about it? You should be so lucky.”

He’s standing tall and sure; they’re on his turf here. So this is it: they’re going to have it out the same way they had it out that night so long ago, when, if she’s being honest, everything began to fall apart. She wants another drink.

“I should be so lucky? You treat me like one of your rent boys, and you expect, what, exactly? From me?”

“I expect you to get hard and to fuck me.”

“Yeah? You leave the money on the nightstand or am I gonna get paid before you put me to work.”

It hits her like a punch to the gut but she refuses to let him see that.

“You want me to pay you?” she all but snarls. Schmidt stays silent, a dare on its own.

“You want payment? Here you go,” she says. And then she gives it to him: the insider info she picked up about an upcoming bill closing gun show loopholes. He’s lost a vote; he doesn’t know that yet. He doesn’t say anything, but she can see him cataloging the information away for later use.

“You know what your problem is?” she continues. “You care about me.” She says it with all the cruelty she has harbored since she met him. Schmidt just stands there, looking down at her, his mouth thin and mean. 

“You say that like an accusation,” he says, deathly still. Elizabeth doesn't say anything. “Like I should be ashamed.”

“Maybe you should be. You know who I am.”

“Yes. I do.” He says it as a fact. She blinks quickly.

“Why are you here?” Schmidt asks.

There’s no good answer for that. Not one she is willing to give. The only answer she thinks at first is that she saw him from across the room and for a split second she imagined that she was understood. That he was something solid and good and was it so bad for someone like her to want something good. 

“Do you know how wet you make me? You should know. You have to know. I saw you, and I knew what I wanted.” She says that instead. It’s a truth but not the full truth. She watches him swallow, the tic at the corner of his jaw. 

There’s no one else. That’s something she could have said, too. She doesn’t think it’s a coincidence she always finds her way to him when she needs to remind herself of who she is. She doesn’t like that; it’s a weakness, her own. 

Elizabeth is in front of him now. He lets her brush against him. “And, I just wanna make sure you get your every penny’s worth.” Square in the center of his chest she traces a dollar sign and then a circle – _$0_.

“That’s what I’m worth, isn’t it?” she says. She watches his face soften. 

“You know that’s never what I meant.” He sounds tired when he says it.

She knows. She also knows she has him now. Even in her heels, he’s too tall. She has to crane her neck to reach his mouth. He lets her do that, too. Her lips drift over his. She kisses him without urgency. If anything, it plays like another debate tactic. Another argument in her favor. She feels his hands twitch at her sides, as if he can’t decide whether to touch her or not. It doesn’t matter – he’s kissing her now, too.

 

 

 

This is what she had wanted –

Schmidt is seated back against the pillows and her body is over him. He’s quiet now, she’s quiet, save for the dramatic groan that breaks from her when she fucks down onto him. His hands grab at her, stilling her hips. He’s quiet save for when he says her name. She rides him, her body bending into his, her body pressing down against his. Her hands try to hold him down, slipping up from the center of his chest to his throat. He arches up into her, offering himself to her, his open mouth smearing against her temple as he pants, as she can no longer hold herself up. The intimacy of it – his hands wrapped around her, strands of her hair catching against his mouth, his sheets that smell like him, his bedroom, his home – is too much. It’s what she wanted. She wanted someone to know her. 

 

 

 

“Why did your wife leave you?”

It’s not quite a laugh from him – soft, a dark edge to it. “Fuck you. There wasn’t any leaving. It was,” Schmidt trails off. “Mutually-assured destruction.”

“How’d you meet her?”

“University.” He gives her nothing more.

“Don’t you think it’s funny that the only people who stay married in this town are the politicians? Everyone who works for them or against them is divorced, a bachelor, or celibate.”

“That’s anecdotal,” he says.

“Everyone I knew at Cole, Kravitz and Waterman was divorced, separated, on wife number three, or fucking mistress number two. Pat was married not even six months before he tried to fuck me at the company Christmas party.”

She doesn’t think of Cole, Kravitz and Waterman often. It’s gone now, a footnote in yet another volume of History of D.C. Scandal. There is no guilt on her end; it simply is no longer a reality. There is nothing left to think there.

“Still anecdotal. Not data.” He says it like she should know that. And she does.

But she lists all the names she knows – lobbyists and journalists and Hill staffers and campaign managers – and eventually arrives at the only two left. She says, “You. Me.”

“We don’t count.” He pauses, as if arriving at a conclusion he has long suspected. “We’re not normal.” Elizabeth says nothing. It’s three years ago and they’re in the glass cage of the Peterson Wyatt office. He’s mad at her, and she is mad at him in turn, meeting his anger with her righteous own. He wants to know if she was ever normal. He is telling her there’s something wrong with her. 

“I should go.”

“Fine,” he says. Another silent pause stretches. For two people who have made a career out of debate and persuasion, silence feels unnatural.

“Do you think it’s still snowing?” she asks. She doesn’t look at him. She feels him shift beside her.

“Maybe.”

“It’s probably still snowing,” she says. Schmidt doesn’t say anything and she doesn’t move.

Elizabeth stays. She wakes in the night and finds his back turned to her. She stares for what feels likea long time. Too long. Finally, she presses herself, her face, into his back. His skin is warm and he does not pull away from her. His breathing is even but she doesn’t think he’s asleep. She closes her eyes, just for a moment. She wills herself to stay. 

Maybe he was right. She’s never been normal. She’s never understood how two people could come together to form anything but opposition. Elizabeth breathes in deep against his skin and tries to match her breath to his. 

He’s asleep when she leaves.

It’s still snowing, or it’s snowing again. She pulls her coat closer around her. She left a note for him on the bedside table; _$0 – paid in full_ , she had written, and beneath that, her phone number. She thinks he’ll call. As for now, she thinks she might walk. 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> widespindriftgaze @ tumblr


End file.
